BY MARTIN KICH

Everyone gives lip-service to the primacy of instruction in institutional missions, but the first place where administrators and boards look for “savings” is almost always instructional budgets and instructional staffing. They almost always say that instruction is where all of the money is, but typically “instruction” accounts for only 30%-40% of a university’s budget, at most—and that includes everything that could conceivably be classified as instruction-related.

The administrators and trustees who are most insistent about the necessity of faculty accountability are often the most likely to promote the privatization of student and campus services as “cost-saving” measures, while never doing any subsequent verification of those promised savings.

The “investment’ in initiatives and enterprises that are supposed to provide additional revenue streams, to make the institution less dependent on tuition and subsidy, and to make academic programs less vulnerable to fluctuations in both—those “investments” almost never produce a consistent return or even become self-sustaining; instead, they very often become further drains on revenue that necessitate further reductions in instructional budgets.

I titled a 2015 post “Now That We Have Transformed Our Institutions to Compete with the University of Phoenix, It’s on Life Support.” As I noted in that post, over the previous decade, our institutions had collectively expended hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in order to compete with the online for-profit colleges and universities that seemed like behemoths and turned out to be the equivalent of the balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades. Why, then, has the abrupt transition to completely online courses been widely deemed so unsatisfactory that it cannot be extended into the next academic year or even the fall semester—even with the summer to allow for less perfunctory preparation? Where, exactly, has all of that “investment” gone?

Those administrators and boards who insist that our colleges and universities will succeed only if they are operated as if they were businesses and our students are treated as if they were customers almost never accumulate surpluses, inevitably create operating deficits, and inevitably balance the books by undermining the value of the “product—of the education–that is being providing to our students.

The people who are most adamant about the need for governmental oversight of public colleges and universities typically have the least interest in maintaining adequate public funding of those institutions.

The people who are the most adamant about the need to limit state subsidies to higher education are typically the most adamant proponents of the necessity of intercollegiate athletics.

The people who have been the most vocally anti-science when it comes to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have also  typically been the strongest proponents of “investing” in the STEM and STEM-related disciplines and reducing the emphasis on, if not eliminating entirely, the humanities and social sciences.

Most of the people who have been promoting charter schools and claiming that public high schools have failed to prepare students for college or the workplace have also been promoting dual enrollment and insisting that high school teachers are qualified to teach college courses.